In Between
by silverscully
Summary: A post IWTB, pre-Revival musing on Mulder and Scully's separation. Kind of dark, depressing, and angsty. Spoilers for later seasons, IWTB, and revival.


Sometimes she pulled words out of her head and they floated down onto the page like white dandelions. It was up to her to figure out if they made any sense. Every time she picked up the pen she wrote to him. She couldn't write to anyone else—not God, not herself. Only him. Dozens of letters that would never be sent, words that built an invisible and useless bridge that neither of them could cross.

She felt empty without him. She knew she would. She woke up every morning, ate breakfast, went to work, moved through her day methodically, like the logical doctor she was. She cared for patients, she did her job, she went home. Sometimes, if she was in the mood, she'd watch TV, but that was rare. Too many shows featuring cops and FBI agents. They were fictional but they hit close to home, reminded her of a time when her life had been crazy as fiction, as climatic as a story. Now she felt as though she were stuck somewhere in the epilogue, or the blank space on the page before it.

Not an hour went by when she didn't think of him. She saw little things that reminded her of his existence. Something as simple as steam rising from a coffee cup would jar some memory—him handing her coffee after a night of love, his fingers lingering ever so slightly on her back. She could not use a pencil without imagining it stuck in the ceiling. The other day she'd seen a crack in the pavement which resembled a line on his forehead. He was everywhere, and nowhere.

If she was stuck, she couldn't begin to imagine how life was for him. He'd always been the type of person that wouldn't give up, but not even his holy crusade for the truth could save him from his greatest enemy, his own mind. Looking back, she realized that there had always been a gray cloud within him, one that hung threateningly above his head, prepared to unravel him. She hadn't noticed it before, or at least hadn't realized it for what it was, until she'd seen him staring lifelessly at himself in the bathroom, his gun in hand. She'd panicked, had him admitted to a psychiatric ward for suicidal behavior. He stayed there for two weeks, and when he was released, he'd apologized, kissed her softly, and then packed up his things and left quietly during the night.

He hadn't been hard to find, but she never approached him later, never told him she knew where he was. She followed him from the grocery store occasionally, talked to his therapist to make sure he was having regular appointments, once had even walked up to his window in the dead of night. He was a real-life Boo Radley now, holed up in a house much too small for him. She was a stalker in love. They still orbited each other as if forever intertwined in a silent celestial fate.

Why she couldn't bring herself to talk to him, she wasn't sure. She only knew that the idea made her feel terrified of what she might find, not only in him, but in herself. Even before his admission into the psychiatric ward she had felt lost, like she'd misplaced herself somewhere. She'd first chalked it up to the beginnings of menopause, ever the scientist. But it wasn't physical. As he lost himself, she started to lose herself, too, and that scared her.

She wanted to believe she could be a person without him. She had always valued her independence. She'd lost it years ago and hadn't even noticed. He must have lost his, too. She made the choice to remain stuck in the murky, uncertain in-between of separation because of her fear that they'd become so wrapped up in each other that they'd canceled each other out. They'd created life together—she still felt pangs of despair when she thought of William—who was to say they couldn't destroy life, too?

Still, deep down, she knew that they couldn't remain in this void of nothingness forever. She still had so much to say to him, and so much love to give him.

So she wrote him. Unconsciously, at first, and then intentionally. She wrote him multiple letters every day, each their own separate world of subject, feeling, thought. She ended each letter with the same sentence: _I need you to come back._

Sometimes multiple times:

 _I need you to come back._

 _I need you to come back._

Until one day, when she could only muster up the strength to write that once sentence. _I need you to come back._ She put it in an envelope, and placed it in the mailbox. It was the only letter she ever sent him.

A week later, she found a yellow post-it note taped to her front door. Her trembling fingers brushed it. Her heart thumped with ache and familiarity.

 _Soon. -Mulder_


End file.
